Video On Trial

Video on Trial is a comedic television program broadcast by Canadian music television network MuchMusic, The show consists of a panel of musicians, comedians and entertainment columnists critiquing music videos in a court room-esque manner - as suggested by its opening tagline, "the show that will never rest until all music videos are brought to justice"

Each episode consists of five music videos in a fictional court-room with five comedians acting as the jurors; poking fun of and questioning each artist's behaviour in each video. However, the "critics" are shown in separate clips to use their opinions. Also, artists' personal lives and off-set behaviour are mocked by the critics in relation to the music video. Most of the opinions by the jurors are improvised but the voiceovers were written by writer Tim McAuliffe, who wrote for The Hour and This Hour Has 22 Minutes. Ron Sparks, one of the show's stars and another This Hour Has 22 Minutes writer, has written for a few episodes.

After the video is critiqued, humorous verdicts are given to the artists which most often relate to them in real-life or their behavior in the video. For example, in the first episode, Gwen Stefani and her video for "Hollaback Girl" were sentenced to "stay 400 metres away from any Harajuku Girls." Most of the videos featured are generally recent, with at least one of the five videos per episode still being in rotation. Older videos are still featured, though, mostly those from the early '00s, and popular videos from 1997 to 1999 have been played on rare occasions.

Special themed episodes have also been produced, usually focusing on a specific theme such as the 80's or 90's, one-hit wonders, songs by Canadian musicians, and Christmas music ("Holiday Crap"). The first VOT special was a MuchMusic "Holiday Wrap" courtroom episode called "Stars on Trial" which starred Sparks as The Judge and McAuliffe as Rusty the Bailiff; six regular jurors sat together as a jury and artists were put on trial in general, not for particular songs as is normally done on the regular VOT show. In a similar manner to a previous holiday special on the network, a special one-hour long episode aired on December 29, 2008 as part of MuchMusic's year-end programming, counting down the top 20 "best of the worst" videos of 2008. The countdown was performed much like regular episodes, but with shorter reviews and no final verdicts.